Introducing http://cs.hubfs.net: a great new F# community initiative takes shape

I’m very glad to announce a new F# community initiative called “The Hub”, hosted at http://cs.hubfs.net, and known as “hubFS”. Broadly speaking, this site aims to be “THE place for F# on the web”. I think this is great – we need a broad reach on the web, and all the signs are that this site is going to be an important place for the F# community over the coming years. It will be a great place to host F# material that doesn’t fit well into an email list or which requires a permanent, searchable home, e.g. blogs, articles, screen shots, forums, code and video.

The Hub is the result of the tireless efforts of Chris Barwick, otherwise known as optionsScalper. It has been in “incubation” over the last while, and is now publicly open. Some of the current entries on the site are:

There are four trustees of The Hub – Scott Isaacs, Chris Barwick, myself and Andy Canfield. Although the site says on the cover “THE place for F#”, please understand that in context – it does, of course, absolutely aim to complement the existing F# List and the existing community web sites, in particular the excellent site and Wiki by Robert Pickering at http://www.strangelights.com/fsharp/, and the F# home pages at http://research.microsoft.com/fsharp/fsharp.aspx. Everyone is welcome to cross-post material from the Hub to here, and to send summaries of interesting discussions and articles from the hub.

Thanks for the coverage of our opening. I say "our" because while I have contributed "tireless efforts" to this project, many others have contributed as well, yourself included. To you and them, I say thank you.

You have provided a standard of excellence in F#. As a community site, we will work to continue that in F# in every manner. I look forward to working with you, the F# team and a great team of contributors that have been invited to make hubFS a place for F#.

It is my sincere hope that The Hub will play a key role in making F# more accessible and will contribute to and benefit from Pickering’s F# Wiki and tutorials, the F# List as hosted at MSR as well as any other community efforts that seek to improve the F# experience for developers.

My personal journey with F# has been fun and I hope that this site also provides that to others as well.

I personally invite and welcome all of your readers to visit, provide commentary, ask questions on the forums or get involved in any other manner.

Sorry about that. I’ve had a few other comments on that as well. The Front Page News is syndicated with RSS, but there is no button on the home page for the RSS (and I had hoped to have that link done by now).

Please note that these feeds (except for the main feed) can also be found by navigating to the Blogs Page (from the top nav bar) and looking in the right hand nav panel. There are blog links (for html reading), RSS feeds (by group) and OPML feeds as well.